Conjunction of Venus and Saturn

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Conjunctions feed


Venus and Saturn will share the same right ascension, with Venus passing 1°02' to the north of Saturn.

At around the same time, the two objects will also make a close approach, technically called an appulse.

From South El Monte , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 03:43 (PDT) – 3 hours and 8 minutes before the Sun – and reaching an altitude of 24° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 06:20.

Venus will be at mag -4.2, and Saturn at mag 0.4, both in the constellation Ophiuchus.

The pair will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

A graph of the angular separation between Venus and Saturn around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the two objects at the moment of conjunction will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
Venus 16h51m10s 19°50'S Ophiuchus -4.2 18"4
Saturn 16h51m10s 20°53'S Ophiuchus 0.4 15"5

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 44° from the Sun, which is in Sagittarius at this time of year.

The sky on 28 Apr 2026

The sky on 28 April 2026
Sunrise
06:03
Sunset
19:33
Twilight ends
21:05
Twilight begins
04:32


Waxing Gibbous

93%

11 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:27 11:48 18:08
Venus 07:31 14:37 21:43
Moon 17:06 22:57 04:41
Mars 05:03 11:19 17:35
Jupiter 10:35 17:43 00:51
Saturn 04:53 11:00 17:06
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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